Curiosity is a very powerful and important aspect of human life. We just cannot seem to live without it. From our interest in the music of popular artistes to everyday recommendations by friends. It is part of everything we do. That is why I find it a cliché to hear people say ‘Curiosity killed the cat’. Who is the cat in question here? Because we would all be culprits if curiosity was a crime.
Curiosity does lead to temptation though; only if you let it. This doesn’t mean we can’t make use of it to make our lives better. Advertisement is the most common way curiosity is used to tempt people. Using what I call the ‘What if…’ factor, because sometimes we know what they are saying is mostly trash but ‘What if… ’? ‘What if what they are saying is a good thing?’, ‘What if it’s actually true?’, ‘What if it can make my life better or so much easier?’, ‘What if it actually solves my problem?’ We are always curious and advertisers make loads of money by preying on our curiosity.
Curiosity does actually change our lives in so many ways we can’t even imagine. It is what influences almost every decision we make in life. This is explained by the meaning of curiosity given by Wikipedia as “Curiosity (from Latin curiosus “careful, diligent, curious,” akin to cura “care“) is a quality related to inquisitive thinking such as exploration, investigation, and learning, evident by observation in human and many animal species.” This shows that the mobile phone you tested at the phone shop, the shoe that you tried on at the boutique, the course you chose in school, right up to this article you are reading is all because of that quality we call curiosity.
We have all heard of the proverb ‘Necessity is the Mother of Invention’, then that makes Curiosity the Mother of Discovery. All the great names of scientists, philosophers and whoever you can think of as a discoverer, had to have at some point been curious or they would not have taken the first step to discovering what they did discover. Albert Einstein once said of himself,
“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.”
This points out the fact that curiosity is a stepping stone to greatness; might not be ‘the’ stepping stone but it is ‘a’ stepping stone, only if we use it rightly and wisely or even knowledgeably.
There is nothing in this world that was invented that is useless because it ought to have had a use at some point during or after invention for it to still be in existence or even had an existence. But does that mean we ought to know how everything works? Definitely not. I use a phone and I don’t know how the hardware coordinates for the phone to work because it’s not important to me all I know is the phone works, all I know I want from it is for it to work. But those who do know how it works are making a lot of money off me out of either repairing them, or improving its function and making me want a much improved one. I’m not curious enough to know, and those who are, are making their life better at my expense if I should say.
But that’s just how life works; we don’t need to know everything about everything. But “It’s better to know something of everything than to know everything of something”. We now live in a world where minimum qualification is no longer one field but plus one field. You have used curiosity all your life unconsciously but now is the time to be conscious about it.
Isn’t it a mystery why you didn’t have to know what this article contained before reading it but yet you read it? Isn’t it a mystery to you why you’ve made it this far through the article? Imagine how watching movie trailers stirs up our interest or lack of interest in wanting to watch the movie. Imagine the mystery surrounding your life if you were always that curious or the lack of mystery if you are not always that curious. What would happen then? I’ll end with one of the most over used phrase ever: ‘I wonder!’, But don’t you?